No, it most certainly is not, because those of us who do not belong to the 95%, those of us who are trying to build new Internet services or new products that need fast, reliable Internet service in order to work, need net neutrality as a core principle in order to have a fair chance at competing. Innovators are always a small percentage of the population, but that does not mean their needs are irrelevant.

The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs for starting a business that gets paid, and filed with other nuisance.

It's that by virtue of their position in the market, the providers can extract all the added value any company makes with their customers. That's because the startup isn't the one choosing their customers' internet access. What the provider charges for access to the customers that signed up with them doesn't factor into the decisions of the market, because the customer doesn't pay it, and likely will never know about it.

And "the market" will not solve this. There are maybe three or four companies large enough to cause significant backlash when they can't be reached. But besides Facebook, YT and Amazon, everyone will have to pay up.

And when faced with the decision to pay or not to pay, the rational decision will be to accept any price that leaves you with a single cent of profit. The power imbalance is staggering, and the potential for success with content startups on the internet will suffer dramatically.

On the practical side, your startups' second to tenth employee better be contract lawyers. Because you don't just have to pay Comcast and Verizon. You will have to make arrangement with every single one of tens of thousands of providers around the world if you want to reach customers connected via their network.

Of course, you probably won't bother with some of them. Or decide against, say, reaching potential customers in Montana. That will kill off several of the best features of the web. Namely the long-tail of default-accessible content that ordinarily nobody would think were interesting to someone of your age in your location.

Your prediction is like a Terry Gilliam movie (which I love!), but it's not actually going to happen that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger

Nothing is happening now that hasn't happened before. People forget, is all.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...

So what? That's traffic that the ISP's customers requested. That isn't Netflix using some shared resource. Customers are paying Verison to transfer data, and if 30% of that data is NetFlix, that's fine. Throttling denies the customer the service they are paying for.

Should FedEx or UPS throttle the number of Amazon packages per address they will deliver on time since Amazon represents a very large percentage of their business?

(If this isn't compatible with a business model based on oversubscription, that's the ISP's problem)

> No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages

Of course not, because that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Obscure ferret jousting fan pages are not competing with Verison. However, ISPs are* often involved in various aspects of "media" production and distribution, which is a conflict of interest.

Ethical or not, this is not a practical issue for new companies.

That's what they've done in the past. They've carved up territory like drug gangs to maximise profit. (Look at the maps - notice how they don't overlap? https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/01/16998/us-internet... ). At the same time, they've often colluded to pass legislation that locks out competitors (https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...). And they've gotten so good at it that even the almighty El Goog couldn't break into their territory - I mean, market.

What makes you think that these rent seekers won't extract their pound of flesh and then some from you and your customers?

After all, past behavior is indeed predictive of future results.

I think the fact that many ISPs have local monopolies is not fine. I don't think net neutrality is related to that, and I think we're basically talking about a corporation billing another corporation for data transfer, which is pretty ok as business models go (and certainly doesn't justify this level of outrage).

STRONGLY disagree! The corporation already billed their subscribers for the data transfer, why should they be paid twice for the same thing?

Are you upset that magazines and newspapers collect payment (twice!) from both readers and advertisers?

No but this is not 'B2B arrangements' were talking about here, this is 'pay us protection money or we'll effectively eliminate your business'

I do get up in arms when a company buys a drug that used to cost $10, makes no improvements to it and ramps up the price to $700, but this is even worse, since in the former case there's at least still only the customer being charged for the product, not also the delivery driver for the right to deliver it.

What value are the ISPs adding that the customers are already not paying for?

> Are you upset that magazines and newspapers collect payment (twice!) from both readers and advertisers?

The cost of a newspaper doesn't usually cover all its production costs via customer sale, so the ads fill the rest, whereas here Comcast is already a hugely profitable company from customer sales anyway.

There's Amazon Kindle 'with special offers (ads), but the device is cheaper than the version without ads. I don't think the plan is for ISPs to make broadband any cheaper for customers by starting to charge businesses for the thing they already were paid for.

I don't think my argument should be this hard to understand, unless you're a Verizon lawyer.

Nobody today is stopping you from hosting a forum about hobby endangered snail breeding from a Raspberry Pi in your closet if you want. I'm sure you've met people who make decent money off of niche websites -- and even giants like YouTube and Gmail have modest competition. Sure, not competition that's gonna eat their lunch, but does every business have to Take Over The World™ to be considered a success?

A few websites capturing most of the public's attention is to be expected to a certain extent: for better or worse, it's always been the case that a handful of media companies lead the conversation (that's why it's called "popular culture").

AWS increasingly monopolizing the web's hardware is something to worry about much more IMO; but so long as they don't get special treatment they can be circumvented.

Without net neutrality, forget about it.

Why? I just don't see it. It makes no sense that telecoms companies are going to go after startups that anyway don't have money. But I can imagine YouTube, for example, is another story, given how much bandwidth must be consumed by it.

Even if true, an open Internet provides a hedge/fallback/alternative to corporate overreach and therefore is necessary.

Net neutrality is what allowed these sites to exist in the first place and push aside the Altavistas and Myspaces of the earlier Internet!

Going one further, after hearing "ending net neutrality is going to kill the internet" one too many times, I got interested in hear what the other side was saying. Populist arguments always make me want to question them and find out more. It's almost a taboo so not be anything but 100% _for_ net neutrality. I resent being told what my opinion should be.

In fact it's pretty interesting to listen to Ajit Pai the FEC chairman talk about it eg https://youtu.be/6Q5_oV4JB10

His point that a "flat internet" disincentives telecoms companies to invest in infrastructure makes some sense. Google, Facebook et al. have completely cut them out of the "applications" part of the Internet (voice, messaging etc) so now all that's left is flat data provision to a stable / not growing customer base which leads to them going on "cruise control", cutting costs and investments.

What if feels at the moment is there's big money behind propping up net neutrality. That's why it's getting so much air time. Would like to follow the money...

Yes, in this case what is good for public also aligns with what is good for GOOG and FB. So what? It's like saying you're not convinced about children getting good education because it aligns with 'big money'.